October 26, 2006
Unused medical supplies put to good use
Leila Gray
News & Community Relations
For each operating room procedure at UW Medical Center, supplies are carefully selected and set out on a sterile tray, easy to reach during critical moments. Sometimes the procedure goes differently than planned, and a few items are left untouched on the tray.
Rather than tossing clean, unused disposables into the trash, the OR team puts them in a sanitary place. Then they are packaged and donated to clinics for the needy around the world. Philanthropies pay for shipment.
One beneficiary is Partners in Health, started by Dr. Paul Farmer, whose biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains, is the 2006 Common Book for all UW freshmen. Farmer has set up medical care for the poor in Haiti, Russian prisons, and slums where resistant strains of tuberculosis have appeared.
The effort to conserve and give extras to places in need was started a few years ago by a UWMC staff member who had volunteered to treat the war-injured in Bosnia and Croatia. There she realized how unused throwaways in American hospitals could help these patients.
Today UWMC operating room nurse Heather Owen coordinates the effort. Besides the OR, unused supplies come from UWMC clinics, heart treatment suites, urology diagnostic areas, maternity units, and other patient care areas.
Putting the project into action took approvals from hospital administrators to assure that compliance, safety, and efficiency issues were addressed and that collection and storage systems worked smoothly.
“The initiative takes a lot of legwork and volunteer hours,” Owen said. “Staff members donate time because many of them have done goodwill work in other countries. Or they have seen how UWMC patients have benefited from surgical and medical care, and want to help people worldwide obtain health care that will improve their lives, too.”
Owen said the most requested items are not high-tech stuff, but stretch wraps, surgical drapes, eye care products, sterile dressings, gauze, butterfly bandages, and clear surgical dressings.
The project team loosely calls itself “Third World Supplies” or “Donated Supplies.”
“There are fabulous people in the OR and other health care areas of the UW,” Owen said. “They are giving and progressive, and want to see good health care translated into a global setting.”
